Including the Sam Adam's Taproom. Whose only job is to HAVE BEER.

getting knicks anons makes me feel like i'm floating how did i end up in this timeline this is the best timeline i've ever been in

jalen kat and josh are such a good trio-within-a-five-man-band because they all cover such different and complimentary forms of intelligence—in many ways they are the classic spock/kirk/bones except that the one with the cool intellectual metallic craftiness is the captain in this case (actually in many ways they are the powerpuff girls. oh my god no one can share this. nobody outside of this website can be allowed to know that kat is bubbles.)

josh's intelligence i think is so tremendously underrated—his on-court vision i think is getting more appropriate respect after that playoff run, but i've said before that everything that makes him seem like a blunt instrument (being "a servant to these guys" on the court, his off-and-on unwillingness to shoot, playing the wise guy to jalen's straight man) seems to me less of a sign of a lack of awareness than mechanisms to make a mind with too much awareness & insight into a mind that's specialized enough to be useful, like i don't think it's a coincidence that the kind of guy who can reply to a question about playing badly due to fatigue with "people who get up at 6 am for 12-hour shifts, they're tired, we play a game" is the same guy who can say "if i'm the fourth best player on a team, that's a good team; if i'm the second best player on a team, we're in trouble" is the same guy who has the vision to set and speed up the pace of the game, spot and grab every loose ball, make the hustle plays, etc. perspective translates.

the funny thing about new york is i think in most other places in the country (respectful exceptions for detroit, philly, other cities where toughness and grit are big parts of the city's self-image) kat would absolutely be the guy identified as the "heart of the team" even despite the obvious pun on josh's name. he easily has the highest emotional iq and the most willingness to discuss his emotions, he has the childhood connection and the on-court role in the offense, i think anywhere else it would be easy to fit jalen, him, and josh into a "head/heart/hands" model. but because this is new york and we do feel strongly about identifying "the guy who does the dirty work" as the guy who makes the blood go through the body (and, i think, because we're a city of trash-talkers and kvetchers and freestylers and guys with big mouths and we make a point of rating the emotional value of the funny guy), josh is always gonna be the heart for us

but i do think, especially after the things he said during those finals games, that doesn't move kat out of the center but instead makes kat the soul and spiritual leader. and i think the things he says to jalen and about jalen reflect that and reflect the fact that he's able to see and articulate the full-scope capital-r romance of the situation, and the narrative of the situation, in a way that jalen can't see and josh is unwilling to express.

i think, to this point, that kat is maybe the best of them at seeing the places where relationships on the court match up with relationships off-court and the places where they separate; when our offense was bad this year, i.e. when it fell into stagnant jalenball, you could see that 1) jalen was in his bad mental habit of "nobody is gonna save gotham city except me", and 2) josh was in his bad mental habit of "grab an o rebound without a plan for it? pass to jalen, the center of my universe", and that reflects actual off-court relationships; whereas kat is able to say something to jalen like "i want to be that partner in crime you haven't had", understanding that josh on the court is not, in fact, a partner in crime, in ways that are totally independent of how much they love each other.